Week 104
-
A man came to clean out the hot water tank. I masked my face and ajarred a window; he took off his shoes, which was unexpected but ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ. (Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about the tradition of removing shoes in the home.) None of these things were spoken about. Afterwards, I enjoyed a consistently warm shower, lovely stuff, only slightly marred by a nagging expectation of another sudden temperature surprise. The pressure still drops every so often, like the imaginary weeing giant āAnglian Waterā is taking a breath, but ĀÆ\_(ć)_/ĀÆ.
-
š² Wondered why the back bicycle wheel was rubbing against the mudguard. The wheel was a bit wobbly, in a way perhaps it shouldnāt be, but so too was the mudguard. A day or so later, late in the evening, with a strange suddenness, I thought, maybe the axleās broken. And so it was. Itās not the first Iāve destroyed, which has everything to do with potholes and nothing to do with being or having fat arse. It can go unnoticed, cos itās not like the wheel falls off ā thereās just a growing sense of something not being quite right, which is easily confused for all the other ennui from different sources.
Well, now the wheel has been replaced, and I might already have collected it back from the local nonāprivate equity owned bike shop if only time were more elastic or Iād not gone outside without a mask.
-
For as long as I can remember, I have consciously tried to go out of my way to avoid walking behind lone women in the dark, etc. (Iām not saying I want a medal or anything, although a medal would be nice.) But perhaps the act of crossing the road, slowing down etc is actually more intimidating, because itās like youāre being more sneaky. I feel like there was a sketch about it, maybe on the radio, maybe John Finnemore or Mitchell and Webb, I donāt know how I would find out.
The nighttime phone-in king Allan Beswick has just touched on the issue.
-
Some work.
At the start of week, I expended some time trying to make my Github Actions action maybe 30 seconds quicker (not to be sniffed at), and maybe it would be a useful exercise to try to write about it. Thereās a step that uploads some stuff to DigitalOcean Spaces (which is like AWS S3, and compatible with most S3 client stuff), for which I was using another action ā itās actions all the way down ā called āDigitalOcean Space Syncā, which adds maybe 30 seconds of overhead and feels like an unnecessary extra dependency. It works by installing and running the AWS Boto3 client inside a container, but I also install Boto3 outwith the container, so why not just use that?
The problem was outside of a container, Boto3 tried to connect to 169.254.169.254:80, which I learn is is the Instance Metadata Service, which is handy when youāre running something on oneās own cloud computing computer (not that one truly owns these things) but not on a GitHub Actions runner. I wonāt lead you down the blind alleys I explored to try to get it to ignore the IDMS in favour of the API key and secret Iād supplied. Eventually, I realised I needed to set the AWS_EC2_METADATA_DISABLED environment variable; my final mistake was believing the documentation, which suggests setting it to false, but no of course you set it to true to, you know, disable it. Cool story.
-
I have subscribed to a Substack newsletter.